Fall in love again with Jane Eyre’

Monday

Apr 25, 2011 at 12:01 AMApr 25, 2011 at 12:25 PM

Cathy Salter

Devotees of literary works by the Brontë sisters, unabashed romantics and movie lovers, mark your calendars. “Jane Eyre” opens Friday at Columbia’s Ragtag Cinema. Reviewers have described this umpteenth film adaptation of “Jane Eyre” as a “thoughtful epic” with strong performances and gorgeous photography that “won’t fail to please.” Director Cary Fukunaga, one reviewer wrote, has shaded this story about a 19th-century governess so that it becomes “an emotionally devastating examination of what it really means to choose one’s own way.”

When you enter the world of Jane Eyre and Thornfield Hall — the estate of Edward Rochester that has employed Jane as a governess — there is no leaving it until the story is done. The cover opens, the tale begins, and once again I walk with Jane and Edward on the grounds of his estate or stand alongside Jane as she looks out from a massive rock outcropping worn smooth and round from the relentless wind that never ceases to blow across the treeless moors of West Yorkshire.

“Jane Eyre” was published in London in 1847 by a person “unknown and unrecommended” by the name of Currer Bell. When the book took London by storm and went into its second printing, readers who had assumed the author was a man learned “Jane Eyre” had been written by Charlotte Brontë, the sister of Emily Brontë, who had earlier published “Wuthering Heights” under the name Ellis Bell.

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s “The Life of Charlotte Brontë,” published in 1857 two years after Charlotte’s death, Gaskell begins: The dour parsonage of Haworth, on the edge of the moors in the North of England, sheltered early in the nineteenth century a family of (six) doomed children touched by genius. There were Charlotte, who wrote ‘Jane Eyre’; Emily, who wrote ‘Wuthering Heights’; their sister, Anne, also a published writer; and in the background of all their lives, the brooding and wastrel brother, Branwell, who might have become a great painter.”

It is to this wild place not far from the Brontë parsonage in Haworth that readers are physically touched by the lives of the characters in “Jane Eyre” and “Wuthering Heights.” In the moors, it is said visitors to the Brontë Museum hear the voices of these extraordinary sisters and the characters they captured long ago with their pens — Rochester’s anguished call across the miles heard by Jane Eyre and, in “Wuthering Heights,” Heathcliff’s tortured walks in the moors in search of the ghost of his soul mate, Cathy.

Like the character Jane Eyre, the Brontë sisters were rarely idle. After walks together in the moors where tales took shape in their heads, the sisters would capture prose on scraps of paper and then read their developing dramas aloud to each other late into the night. These amazing women — Charlotte, Emily and Anne — had no local library, Internet access, typewriter, computer or electricity. Their only heat was from the parsonage fireplace.

What they knew of the world, they learned from books in their father’s personal library and personal experiences in their own lives. Until their novels were published, they had never traveled to London. Their novels are among the most passionate in the English language, and yet of the six Brontës, only Charlotte would marry — though tragically just nine months before her untimely death at the age of 39.

Charlotte Brontë once wrote: “I’ve dreamt in my life dreams that have changed my ideas. They’ve gone through me … like wine through water, and altered the color of my mind.” What literary treasures the Brontë sisters left for generations of fans who continue to this day to fall in love over and over again with the characters, language and landscapes they so brilliantly imagined and penned by candlelight.

Director Cary Fukunaga’s “Jane Eyre” starring Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender opens at Ragtag on Friday. It’s never too late to fall in love with a Brontë classic.

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